SXSW 2012: #BigBabies – Why Baby Boomers = Public Media FAIL

Posted on:March 10th, 2012

Thanks everyone who braved the rain and came to our SXSW panel this morning!

I’d like to especially thank Dee Kapila for proposing the panel in the first place, fellow-panelist Jonathan Coffman and a huge huge thanks to John Barth from PRX for stepping in to moderate at the 11th hour when our planned moderator got sick and had to cancel.

Here is some of the collected feedback from Twitter. We’re working on a longer, more detailed summary of the session and will have that up in the near future.

We’d also love to keep this conversation going, so if you have any thoughts, feedback or other questions, feel free to leave a comment on this post. We’d love to hear from you!

Holy crap! This one page, compiled from your panel, encapsulates my entire #pubmedia career (such as it was). GenX (which I am) is definitely the “lost generation” of public media. I couldn’t get anywhere useful in the system after a few years. Boomers in the corner offices were all about the top-down and the maintenance of the old models — experimentation and new thinking was a threat. Boomers also religiously defended their positions rather than focusing on mission in a changing media landscape. Where experiments were tried, it was done on the backs of cheap 20-something labor with no real direction, which yielded classic failure, which was punished.

I’ve concluded there is no hope for the current public media models, aside from guarding existing territory. There are pockets of good work where the money supports it (NPR), but broadly the system faces increasing irrelevance and collapsing funding in the years to come. The only hope is that an organization like NPR could take over public media as a whole, leading it with a clarified central mission (news) and greater efficiencies and economies of scale.

There’s a future out there for the mission and principles of public media. But it won’t be led by Boomers, who are just skating to retirement and taking everything for themselves along the way.

Today I’m back in healthcare technology, and lemme tell you something — this is a fast-moving and fascinating industry comprised of multiple generations and players at all levels of government, nonprofits, and private companies. It’s not as simple as public media, and there are many factions with different ideas about the future. But technology and communications and media are all part of that future and everyone knows it.

God bless you to the Millenials and GenXers still working in public media. You guys are doing great work and I hope you’re not suffering too much. Just know there are places for you out there, outside public media, where you can have a community impact and don’t have to be second-class citizens in your own workplaces.

http://twitter.com/javaun Javaun Moradi

I wasn’t in Austin for SXSW and would’ve missed this hugely valuable discussion — except that you took the time to curate it so well, Adam. Thank so much, I’m sharing it widely.